Responsible Business Practice

Virgin culture
Unlike typical corporate businesses, Virgin actively encourages personal expression - in speech, creative thinking, and (where uniforms aren’t required) dress.

Fun at Virgin is not a dirty word; it’s a key brand value, a management style and a vital ingredient of our culture. We believe in putting the fun into functions. We organise heaps of activities designed to promote team spirit and reinforce brand values, not to mention countless social events and staff parties, including Richard Branson’s summer party for all staff.

Virgin has an Internal Communications community whose job it is to keep all Virgin employees informed in an engaging and enjoyable way. The Virgin Village is a Group intranet site where employees can have a laugh whilst accessing the latest information about the Group, job opportunities, contacts, and so on. Each Virgin company also communicates with staff on a regular basis, updating them on any changes and the progress of the business.

Communication flows both ways at Virgin. We take the views of our employees seriously because we believe they are crucial to the success of the company. Indeed, many brilliant Virgin ideas have come from our staff. We aim to make it as easy as possible for employees to air their views, express their ideas and voice any problems they may have without fear of censure. Here are some of the ways they can do this:

We're always keen to assess just how we're doing so, each Virgin company has measures in place to monitor employee initiatives and we track non-financial indicators of company performance at a Group level too, to ensure that we’re doing as well as we think we can.

We collate data on a quarterly basis in the following areas:

• Our diversity profile (gender, age, ethnicity, disability)
• Indicators of employee satisfaction or otherwise (turnover, sickness, employee survey responses, number of grievances)
• Key People initiatives such as the 0% Challenge